ABSTRACT: This light-hearted, yet research-oriented presentation is based on some of my Wiley/IEEE Press monographs arguing that Shannon’s information-theoretic visions were formulated in the context of ideal lossless entropy encoders, which may have a high codeword length and associated high coding delay. Under idealistic Gaussian channel conditions Shannon formulated his source- and channel-coding separation theorem. However, losslessly entropy-coded multimedia messages become undecodable in the presence of transmission errors, regardless of the index or position of the corrupted bits. Hence all source-encoded bits have an equally high error sensitivity. By contrast, practical lossy multimedia source codecs exploit the psychoacoustic and psychovisual masking properties of the human ear and eye and hence achieve significantly higher compression ratios than entropy codecs. Nonetheless, they often still exhibit residual redundancy, which manifests itself in terms of a correlated source-encoded messages that exhibit unequal bit sensitivity. This unequal bit sensitivity justifies the employment of unequal-protection joint source and channel coding, exchanging extrinsic information across the entire turbo-transceiver. Furthermore, realistic dispersive fading channels tend to inflict bursty, rather than randomly distributed transmission errors. This light-hearted keynote address will highlight a range of radical research advances in joint source and channel coding as well as wireless transmissions in the interest of approaching the Shannonian predictions not only for transmissions over benign Gaussian, but also over hostile fading channels.
SPEAKER: Lajos Hanzo received his firstclass Master degree in electronics in 1976, his PhD in 1983 and his Doctor of Sciences (DSc) degree in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng). During his career in telecommunications he has held various research and academic posts in Hungary, Germany and the UK. Since 1986 he has been with the School of ECS, University of Southampton, UK, here holds the Chair in Telecommunications. He co-authored 16 books totalling 10 000 pages on mobile radio communications, published in excess of 800 research papers, organised and chaired conference sessions, presented overview lectures and has been awarded a number of distinctions. Currently he heads an academic research team, working on a range of research projects in the field of wireless multimedia communications sponsored by industry, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) UK, the European IST Programme and the Mobile Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCE), UK. He is an enthusiastic supporter of industrial and academic liaison and he offers a range of industrial courses. Lajos is also an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer as well as a Governor of both and a Fellow of both the IEE and IEEE. He acts as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Press. For further information on research in progress and associated publications please refer to http://www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk.
